- Healthy Planet workflows fully staffed and on track for go-live despite organization-wide staffing challenges.
- Relieved executive oversight burden by enabling a trusted analyst to lead independently.
- Applied Community Connect best practices to reduce implementation delays for a system with high customization complexity.
Background
A major academic medical center recently began its first Community Connect partnership with a large ambulatory organization comprising over 100 clinics. The initiative involved transitioning the partner from Allscripts to the academic center’s customized Epic environment. With a go-live date set for Q4 2025, the project required careful planning to balance customization, resource allocation, and leadership bandwidth.
Goals
- Ensure a smooth and timely go-live of Healthy Planet applications.
- Reduce day-to-day involvement of executive leadership.
- Adapt a highly customized Epic environment for a partner that is new to the platform.
- Maintain project momentum and transparency amid limited staffing.
HDM’s Success Story
HDM’s Healthy Planet analyst brought deep experience in both Community Connect and complete installations. The analyst’s familiarity with balancing technical demands and client needs enabled them to fully own their application’s implementation, freeing leadership to focus elsewhere.
“Out of all the application teams involved, Healthy Planet is the only one where the manager hasn’t had to be in every meeting,” the analyst said. “He’s trusting me with the entire process, and that’s helped leadership focus on other projects.”
Treating the rollout as a completely new install rather than a modified version of the academic system proved critical. A dual partnership approach included evaluating social determinants of health (SDOH), presenting custom domain options, and tailoring Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) workflows based on the partner’s staffing structure. Notably, the analyst and HDM developed strategies to exclude Community Connect patients from research-specific tools that could have caused registry issues.
Despite broader staffing constraints, the Healthy Planet component remained in the green—on track and aligned with the project’s overall Orion task framework.
Lessons Learned
- Staffing Expectations: Early projections didn’t fully account for the level of customization, leading to resource gaps. A more thorough impact analysis up front would have improved allocation.
- Empowering Analysts Works: Allowing experienced analysts to lead independently reduces the leadership burden and boosts efficiency.
- Start Fresh: For highly customized systems, approaching the project as a new build is often more effective than trying to mold a foundational setup.